San Juan Hills Greens

San Juan Hills Greens covers 22.48 acres and the city's address layer records 157 addresses inside it on four named streets: Camino Del Rio, Paseo Del Sol, Paseo Hacienda and Via De Costa. All 0.72 miles of street inside the boundary appear on the city's Private Roads layer, so the association maintains them rather than the city. The whole boundary is zoned Planned Community District, 22.5 acres of it, and the General Plan carries 20.2 acres as Medium Density with a further 2.2 acres as Open Space Recreation, the designation the golf ground beside it carries.

Four interior points were tested against the Capistrano Unified locator and all four returned the same three campuses. Harold Ambuehl Elementary takes TK through fifth grade with 324 students at a 23 to 1 ratio, 53 percent meeting the state standard in English language arts and 59 percent in mathematics, and it feeds Marco Forster Middle, which enrolls 930. San Juan Hills High School enrolls 2,641 and graduated 96.2 percent of its class. All 22.5 acres of the boundary sit in the High fire hazard severity class.

The Greens were built between 1992 and 1996 along the edge of the San Juan Hills golf course, on the low ground beside Camino del Rio where the valley opens out. Golf course neighborhoods exist here for a particular reason: after the town wrote density limits and open space protection into its 1974 general plan, a course was one of the few ways a developer could bank a large piece of green and still build houses around it.

The ground was farm before it was fairway. After the ranchos collapsed in the 1860s the valley turned to wheat, barley and then walnuts and citrus, and the arrival of the railroad in 1887 gave growers a national market for the first time. The last of that ended within living memory, and in 1990 the town's voters approved an open space bond the city used to buy land outright and keep it open.